Headed to Emptoris Empower This Week

I'm headed to Emptoris Empower this week to cover the latest goings-on at a provider which I know a lot of Spend Matters readers have a number of questions about. Emptoris, which pioneered -- or at least commercialized -- many product innovations in the sourcing and supply management world, is now a provider in transition, searching for a permanent CEO who can take it to the next level. But in the meantime, I know what matters most to Emptoris customers and partners is what the venerable 128-area provider is working on in regards to its products. At the event, while I'm sure I'll learn a bit more about the management and strategy happenings going on at the top, my primary focus will be to dig into Emptoris' solutions, including the latest regarding the integration of Click's services procurement platform.

In this regard, specifically, I'd welcome any guidance from Spend Matters readers about any areas they'd like me to investigate in specific detail. I'm personally quite interested in the latest coming out of Emptoris regarding innovations in their core sourcing/optimization and spend analysis tool sets (not to mention how they might organically expand the solution-set in the area of supplier information management, just as Ariba has recently done). Clearly, while Marlin, Emptoris' owner, is no doubt interested in non-organic growth, if Emptoris does not continue to innovate in the core areas that got it to where it is today, they'll lose customers and miss-out on new opportunities over time.

Contract management as it pertains to both legal and procurement organizations is another area I'm interested in digging into as well, especially around how Emptoris has been servicing customers and releasing new versions/upgrades of late (a topic that I know a number of users have brought up in the not-so-distant past). Moreover, in the contract management market today, I'm seeing Emptoris appear less frequently in new deals than I have in the past. I think it's important to get to the bottom of this.